2018: August

Owned by Colin Wallis (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Sept 05, 2018 by Ken Dagg (Unlicensed)
4 min read

Hello everyone

This is the running update from the Executive Director. Have questions or comments? Suggest some added information or edits? Contact ED colin at kantarainitiative dot org.

...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

I’m in sunny Seattle in the first week of September as I write this month’s edition of Director’s Corner, as we start the second half of the conference season.  

Our first event conference, hosted by our friends MyData2018, was held just last week in Helsinki. The Kantara community was well represented as members Consentua, digi.me, Open Consent Group, Trunomi and Ubisecure demonstrated an interoperability use case for the Kantara Consent Receipt.  These, along with other members such as Datafund, iWelcome, UNLOQ, and non-participants such as MyLifeDigital have all deployed Kantara’s Consent Receipt in a variety of ways inside their solution offerings.  Kantara, in a conference containing more theory than practice, showed the personal data community with the interop demo, Adrian Gropper’s demo of HIE of One with UMA and my own presentation on the many ways in which Kantara delivers on the 6 MyData principles that, ‘while others talk, we do’.

The International Identity Summit (IIS) event hosted this year in Seattle (the reason why I am here) by the University of Washington with the Industry host and Kantara liaison DIACC, is very different. It is essentially an invitation-only government event where jurisdictions share knowledge behind closed doors that are later opened to allow industry to engage. Typically Kantara might not attend because it has not been granted podium time. But with Kantara holding the largest contingent of government members of any identity industry consortia and the fact that KIPI program performer Lockstep Technologies is announcing its transition to commercialization along with members Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada, 1Kosmos and SecureKey Technologies all presenting, we are honor-bound to support them as you might expect Kantara could do for you.  

But it doesn't stop there. We have the Consumer Identity World series kick off its 2018 Tour in Seattle in 2 weeks time, featuring Kantarians Eve Maler, David Turner and Andrew Hughes on Friday September 21st. Discounts are available to members for this event. Later in the month I will be speaking on the state of the industry in London at Ubisecure's opening ceremony for its London office.

Looking back into August, Kantara had both a busy and successful month.

In the US, Kantara's Assurance Review Board, the executive sub committee of the main Board governing the Trust Framework Operations and Assurance programme, recommended to Kantara’s Board that ID.me be granted a Trust Mark as the first Credential Service Provider that conformed to NIST SP 800-63-3 Identity Assurance at IAL2 & AAL2. The extensive press coverage (read the combined press release here) that the grant of Trust Mark received, has started a wave as several additional providers (some of which you can see here) joining the queue for approval and grant of Trust Mark through Kantara’s Trust Framework Operations Programme. The transition of IDESG's assets into the newly established 501c3 entity (the Kantara Initiative Educational Foundation Inc) was completed in July and August. This was a period of consolidation with the IDEF WG beginning to take shape with further work drafting its charter. Kantara has control of IDESG's website and wiki and of course the IDEF Registry in its new V2 guise as well as the IDEF Trust Mark re-styled for Kantara's stable of schemes.  

In Europe, Kantara Initiative Europe, the Estonian based trade association operating Kantara's assets under licence, was successful in winning a bid for grant funding for ICT24 Next Generation Internet from the European Commission under the H2020 program. 

Our summer webinar series featuring 2 Australian members - the Australian Government's Digital Transformation Agency and Lockstep Technologies entiies on MDAV, drew a good number of attendees with great questions. Thank you to those that attended and if you registered you would have received the links to the presentations and recordings. We ran out of time during DTA's webinar to answer several of the more detailed questions. The eGov Working Group, as the host of the seminar, has resolved to approach DTA to do a follow-up 'deep dive' on some specific aspects of the Trust Framework and technical architecture. Join the eGov WG and stay tuned for more details.

On the process and procedures side of the house, your Leadership Council leads progressed the revision to the Operating Procedures over July and August. It is very close to being able to share with you, so stand by for it. My thanks to Ken Dagg, Sal D'Agostino and Andrew Hughes.

August saw Digicert and Condon Associates LLC join Kantara from IDESG, and membership renewals from the Australia Government's DTA, ForgeRock, Meeco, Ubisecure, Mark Lizar and a Board directed complimentary membership to longtime Kantara Board member and unflagging supporter Nat Sakimura of NRI for 9 years of service. Thank you one and all for your support for Kantara and the growing community it serves.   

Kind Regards,

Colin

Around the Houses:

Marketing:

Program, Work Group and Discussion Group Updates:

  • You can always keep up with the latest news from the Work Group and Discussion Groups directly off the Leadership Council's Blog. See the list of public groups here.

  • As always our Specifications, Recommendations and Reports are available for download from our Reports and Recommendations web repository - now with frictionless access.  

Events: See them all here!